Uncovering The Storied Life Of Madame Clicquot

This week, in a raw space south of the river, a collection of installations opened, each one a creative response related to the storied life of the “Grande Dame of Champagne”, Madame Clicquot.

First, you must understand, she was not just a champagne producer, but a technological innovator in the field, making champagne clear and dry as we know it today and becoming possibly one of the world’s first female entrepreneurs. Her father was a wealthy baron, but she grew up against the violent backdrop of the French Revolution, being smuggled out of her convent school at the age of 11 through an angry mob that was beheading local aristocrats. She grew up in a dream world of seclusion, her father protecting her from the viscous tides of blood in the outside world. As was customary, she married at 21 and was soon widowed at the tender age of 27 and no one wanted to take over the business. At this point, she decided to turn tragedy into fortune, and began running her husband’s business in 1804. She never remarried.

These are the facts that underpin the radical life of Madame Clicquot – later known as Veuve (or Widow) Clicquot. Creative director Tom Hingston has curated a series of collaborative installations to tell some of her incredible stories, pushing creatives from the London music underground to go beyond their known arenas and work with space. Some collaborative partnerships here are extremely intimate and have been formulated over decades, others had hardly met.

The new generation of rebels, kids from Nick Knight’s film Revolution.

Renowned set designer Anna Burns addressed one of my favourite stories – in 2010, divers came across a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea and discovered in the cargo 47 bottles of Veuve Clicquot. Still drinkable and delicious, Veuve Clicquot came up from the murky deep with the taste of the days when Madame was presiding. It was postulated that this was a gift from King Louis XVI to the Russian emperor, and constitutes the oldest drinkable champagne in the present day. Burns and Neneh Cherry created a musty, moldy underwater landscape through a hazy watery adaption of her song "Kong" experienced within the towering sculptural speakers by Funktion-One.

Turn a corner and end up in a small dark corridor with a slideshow of black and white images of the anonymous female form – decapitated by framing we see pale flesh of female torsos, limbs, buttocks, feet in stockings, fetish gear and heels. It brings to mind Daido Moriyama or a closely cropped Helmut Newton without hair and make-up, with the distance between subject and photographer collapsed, more akin to Nan Goldin’s "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency". A small yet urgent voice with a sweet tinge of French accent urges us, in the tone of a quiet manifesto to move beyond fear - “a life lived in fear, is equal to no life at all.”

The work, called "Crimes Against Love" is by Jehnny Beth and Johnny Hostile, who are more well known for their work together on Savages, the all-female post-punk band known for her soaring vocals, jagged guitar and brooding bass. They are a couple and he produces the records, they met at the beginning of her musical career in London. The two of them have been making a body of photographic work for the past two years and have never shown it publicly. They spoke to me of creating a safe space in a relationship for exploration and experimentation, Beth noting that, just as in an intimate relationship, this is also what she seeks on stage. It’s a space always heightened by the intensity of fear and the danger of what could happen but, she says, that’s what keeps us alive and we must embrace it. The corridor mirrors a space in their Paris flat where all the photographs were taken.

Tom Hingston’s three channel video featuring the remarkable physicality and expressiveness of lead singer Alloysious Massaquoi from Young Fathers.

Long-term collaborators Nick Knight and stylist Simon Foxton worked together on an epic film that delves into Knight's roots in punk London. His first ever publication called Skinhead put him on the map for his unflinching look at the codes of dress, music and attitude that created a document of the London early '80s scene. Here, Knight found a whole new cast of characters, young kids in London (not models, but perhaps should be) who are in punk bands today. Loud punk anthems of individual kids performing their characters were punctuated by a silent spliced line up of them all together glaring to camera, belying a combination of newspaper outfit analysis of the Queen with the whodunit line-up of murder mysteries. Attitude was palpable.

The installation by Rebecca Louise Law and light artist Chris Levine blended two individual artists who are wholly confident in a singular medium. Law works exclusively with flowers, preserved through a chemical process that allows them to exist in installations while feigning life, they are still flexible, they still give off a powerful smell. Levine, on the other hand, is one of the world’s most well-known artists working with light and lasers. Together they presented an infinity field, the organic texture of each fading flower catching the hard-edged light of the lasers. The work was activated by a unique soundscape by Massive Attack, created by Fantom, an app that Robert Del Naja developed to encourage users to make their own personal dub mixes from Massive Attack songs.

London jewellery designer Hannah Martin with shackle post earrings of her own design.

Another dark room leads to a display of futuristic cyborgs – human-ish in form but with an uncanny perfection only achievable through digital technologies. A rotating sculpture of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones was created from 3D scanning the unbelievable body of hip hop dancer Dickson Mbi, his powerful masculine presence adorned with finely articulated body pieces of feminine forms – a mask in the shape of a vagina, a codpiece in the shape of a uterus and platform wedges hanging off his truncated ankles all created by Caroline Holzhuber, an experimental shoe designer most well known for her ongoing work with Iris van Herpen.

Me in the only quiet corner of the whole place, wearing Molly Goddard dress and leather trench coat by Rejina Pyo, and boots by Ganni.

In 1811, a comet blazed across the sky over Reims. In the fickle, witchy way that grapes respond to earth, the elements, the sun and the moon, this year led to an exceptional vintage. The Comet Bar, designed by Hingston, invokes his memories of The Second Summer of Love, the late '80s rave scene of the warehouses of London that heralded the birth of the acid house movement from the then-tiny island of Ibiza to the rest of the world. The entire sound of the space has been created by Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, and Liam Hodges conceived and created the club-kid outfits for all the people working in the space.

Hingston curated the whole experience. He’s known for his work of creating a powerful visual image that corresponds to music – whether the final music videos for David Bowie or a life-size chocolate cast of Grace Jones or a velour jacket for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds merchandise or one of his many album covers for Massive Attack. Music is a conduit for collective feeling. Hingston has gathered together some of the most radical, genre defying creatives in London to collaborate around the feeling of rebellion.